America Can You Spare a Dime’s Worth of Difference?

For that is the true genius of America — that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.— Barack Obama, Election Night 2008

How is that “hopey-changey thing working out for you? — Sarah Palin, February 2010

America is at war with change, as a time of decision approaches. Anger rears its ugliness from a nation stripped of its hope, whether a silly confrontation between a passenger and a beleaguered flight attendant, a state of fear in Arizona, or the political fabrication of xenophobia based on the wings of a basketball court, and a prayer in a Manhattan neighborhood. Our national attention span– ill fed by too much misinformation — seems incapable of separating reality from the meltdown of our once-and-future tolerance.

Meanwhile, many of us face real issues such as poverty, hunger, and homelessness, as unemployment continues to shred our hopes for the future. This country invests our precious dollars in killing fields overseas, and factories built overseas on sweat equity more foreign to American tradition than any Mexican drug gang. What we “can and must achieve tomorrow,” seems on an extended vacation far longer than the current Congressional break. Fear is America’s interloper when the national blood pressure rises to unhealthy levels. We are free to imagine our personal bogeyman when it becomes too difficult to resolve our reality. America’s history is vibrant with imaginary antagonists ready to seize our individual foundations. Why blame ourselves for failing progress when our continued comfort calls for a scapegoat.

This is a nation, like Linus from Peanuts in search of a blue blanket. The familiar is the comfortable, and strangers that don’t look like us or share our history are as un-American as the natives that met Christopher Columbus. If Catholics want to put up a Church across the street from the “happiest place for children on earth” — Disneyland — it is free to do so, even if there is a history of pedophilia in the organization. If, on the other hand, Moslems want to pray and/or play basketball in a building not far from where some of its membership were victimized along with “regular” Americans, it should not happen because a few that looked like them flew planes into buildings. If corporate growers are encouraged to import desperately needed laborers for their farms because of loose immigration laws, the laborers should be punished for their dreams, instead of corporations for their tightfistedness and their defiance of the law.

As a White German immigrant to this country, I have not experienced the fears of xenophobes. There was a time of course, when Germans were not held in high esteem in this country — as were other immigrant waves throughout this country’s experience. But, I have experienced a different kind of isolation, stemming from a different kind of change. Surrendering male privilege is not something that is appreciated in this country. No one really born “male” would do so. Yet, I am looked upon askance because I corrected a birth defect and became the woman I was meant to be. Fortunately, I do not represent a massive movement that threatens the future of all that the X chromosome engenders — liberty, inequality, and adultery. I can’t be legally blocked from living my dream, but I can be shadow-boxed into dishonorable discharge from our society.

As I face the hardship of poverty at the age of 62, after two years of fighting for basic employment with my qualifications tied behind my back, I wonder when the time will come when America not only can change, but accepts change. Until it does, I may find myself accepting change at freeway entrances.